


Chorni Vorov

by apocalypticmailman



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Chernobyl (TV 2019) References, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Interviews, Other, big cw for radiation poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23866741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalypticmailman/pseuds/apocalypticmailman
Summary: Ten years after the Chernobyl accident, researcher Sansa Stark conducts an interview with a liquidator.
Kudos: 4





	Chorni Vorov

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally gonna be Jonsa, but that didn't really end up happening, but I thought it was alright anyway and decided to share with all of you. Historical and authorial notes at the end.

The smell of stale cigarettes was the first thing Sansa noticed. Not out of place in a Kiev apartment block, but for some reason it was particularly noticeable—maybe because she couldn’t smell anything else, except a faint odor of disinfectant. Like a hospital.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “Sit wherever you’re comfortable. Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” she said. Quiet and polite, just as she’d been raised.

The man grunts. “Suit yourself.” He pulls a cup from his cabinet, pouring equal parts tea and vodka. He’s more than earned the right to it, she can tell that much; even though she knew next to nothing about this man, except one of his medals, his steps were heavy with the weight of duty. He looked old enough to be her father.

_It started with his hair, thinning and greying unnaturally for his age. Weakness, fatigue; that might’ve all been combat stress. A lot of men who’d gone to Afghanistan aged young. The first time he had coughed up blood, he went to the doctor the next day. Then, he was referred to the hospital—a battery of tests, biopsies, blood work—before the results came back. Stage three cancer. “From smoking,” even though it wasn’t in his lungs._

Trudging over to the kitchen table, he sits down across from her. She nods, clicks on her tape recorder with a loud _thunk._

“April 20th, 1996,” she begins. “Can you start by telling me about yourself?”

He sighs. “My name is Jon Snow. I have lived in Kiev my whole life. Komsomol, joined the Red Army at 18. I was a liquidator, at Chernobyl.”

_Liquidator._ That word that contained so much. So much pain and effort, service and sacrifice.

She swallows, her mouth suddenly dry. “Can you tell me about your work in the Zone?”

“Of course,” he begins, heavily. “I worked to clear the roof of Reactor Building Three.”

“The roof?”

Jon nods. “After the explosion, there was a bunch of debris on the roof of the neighboring reactor. It had to be cleared, or no one could work up there to build the Shelter Object. Too much radiation. The roof was in three sections—Katya, Nina, and Masha. I think Masha peaked at 12,000? Maybe 13,000 roentgens an hour? I asked a dosimetrist, but I don’t remember.” A drag on his cigarette. “That much radiation would kill you with about five minutes’ exposure.”

_The other two roofs had been cleared already, old Lunokhod rovers taken out of storage and put to work. He could see on the TV footage, the sharp, boxy outlines of the robot that had tried to clear the third. Joker—supposedly it was West German, or maybe British. It had died up there quickly. Masha had a horrible kiss._

Sansa manages to keep her face neutral—this isn’t the first of these stories she’s heard. She already knew about the ones who died. She nods for him to continue.

“So, obviously, we couldn’t stay up there for very long. We worked in shifts lasting ninety seconds.”

“Ninety seconds?”

He nods again. “A minute and a half. You and three or four or five of your comrades would rush out onto the roof, pick up a block of graphite or a few shovelfuls of concrete, throw it back into the reactor, and come back in. And that was it—you were done.” His voice is hoarse; she can’t tell if it’s from health complications or grief.

_The air up there was clear—too clear. Too bright. He can remember just smudges of the rest of his service, but every one of those ninety seconds were burned into his mind forever. Rushing out—every placement of his footsteps—the taste of metal in his mouth—labored breathing in his ears. The crunch of the dust going into his shovel, the arc it made as it was thrown over the side—don’t look! Do NOT look over the side—now another, a chunk of the graphite itself, muscles straining to lift it. Drops it by the edge and miraculously it rolls down into the maw of the dead reactor. He turns to retrieve another, the German police robot a flash of yellow in his peripheral vision, when the harsh ring of the bell sounds. Time’s up._

“That’s how it was supposed to work, anyway. But I…I wasn’t going to let someone else go up there, not if I could prevent it. I had already been burned up; no sense letting someone else die too, if I could still hold a shovel. So I found the cowards. There were a few; men who were too afraid to go up on the roof. I can’t blame them. I won’t judge them. None of us did; anyone could back out, because no one wanted someone unreliable at their back up there. All I did was ask for their dosimeter, and pinned it on my shirt instead of theirs…” With shaking, pale hands, he lifts his teacup to his lips. “It was my duty.”

Quietly, Sansa prompts him. “You all wore dosimeters?”

Another nod. “Yes. We had a little badge with some film on it—all of us, that is, not just us on the roof. When it hit twenty-five roentgen, we were sent home. If it hit twenty-six, our commander would be in trouble.”

“How much radiation were you exposed to?”

A wry smile. “Twenty-five roentgen.”

Slowly, it dawned on Sansa exactly what that meant. She felt dizzy.

Jon continues. Not unaware; she can see it in his eyes, the hand that reaches out briefly before retreating. But he continues anyway, and it brings her back to the present.

“I don’t know how many sorties I did, just that I was there at the end of it. I shook General Tarakanov’s hand…” He holds out a hand, smiling, still disbelieving after all these years. _I serve the Soviet Union._ “That last sortie was stupid. Raising the flag, like it was the Reichstag. Do you know it took them three or four tries to get up there? They tried landing a helicopter on that roof once it was cleared…” He breaks off and chuckles. “Eventually, they got three men up the vent stack and dropped the banner. It was stupid—senseless—an absolute waste of three men, but when I saw it…When I saw that red banner, I knew the job was done.”

After a moment, she clears her throat. “How did you come to be a liquidator?”

Jon smiles faintly, leans back. Fond memories of his service. “I was in the Red Army when the accident occurred. The army was who they called to work. Us, reservists, civilian conscripts. One day, we were sitting in the barracks, and our platoon commander came and told us we were going to Chernobyl.” Another drag. “And then it was onto a train, and then a truck, and when we dismounted, we were given dust masks and a billet and there we were.”

She thought for a moment—she had been in graduate school then. A sickening realization struck her.

“How old are you?”

His face falls. Eyes mist. He knows what that question means. “I’m 34 years old."

**Author's Note:**

> In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, one of the major tasks in the management of the accident was clearing the roofs surrounding Reactor Building 4 of radioactive debris that had landed there after the explosion. The roof was in three sections (I used their actual names), and while two were successfully cleared with mothballed Lunokhod rovers, the high radiation levels on Masha required specialized equipment. The Soviets procured a West German police robot named Joker, which was said to be able to do the job, but failed within minutes due to the high levels of radiation. So, the task fell, ultimately, to human beings.
> 
> The so-called "biorobots" or "men on the roof" worked in 90-second shifts to clear the roof, 90 seconds being the longest they could stay up there before reaching the maximum allowable lifetime dose of radiation for nuclear power workers. Despite Jon doing this at 24, most of the biorobots were reservists in their 30s and 40s. Most only did the job once, but there are some reports of men doing this five or six times.
> 
> At the end of the roof cleaning, three men did carry a red banner to the top of the vent stack and plant it there, in a move clearly intended to echo the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag at the end of the Second World War. It did take several attempts.
> 
> It's unknown exactly what the long-term casualties of the disaster are. While the Soviet Union did issue a moratorium on diagnosing radiation-related conditions, the simple fact of the matter is that calculating the exact number of deaths due to cancer caused by Chernobyl is practically impossible, just because it's almost impossible to conclusively link these conditions to radiation exposure and not anything else.
> 
> Can you tell this is my special interest?


End file.
